下一波科技革命瞄准官僚主义

    第三波：新的管理模式

    我相信，下一波IT革命将颠覆传统的管理模式，也就是企业用来规划发展、确定优先秩序、分配资源、协调关系、衡量绩效、招聘人才和明确奖惩的机制及流程。事实上，拖大多数公司后腿的最大因素并不是僵化的供应链，也不是低效的商业模式，而是那种少数人手握大权、多数人无权可用的管理模式。这种传统的管理模式更注重的是效率而不是其他目标，更注重的是下级服从上级而不是其他美德。它削弱了企业的适应能力、创新能力和激励能力，而这些能力对企业来说将变得越来越重要。

    自从摩西带领以色列人出埃及以来，大规范人际协调的基本架构基本上就没怎么变过。如果你问问一名谷歌的工程师、一位瑞士信贷（Credit Suisse）的品牌经理、一名英国的护士、一位在里约贫民窟服务的牧师、一个上海虹口区看守所的警卫、一个阿联酋国际航空公司的飞行员，让他们各自画一张所在单位的组织结构图，很可能你会看到他们画出的都是一个个类似的金字塔结构。

    这种结构可以说是人类最经久不衰的社会结构。等级制度既简单又可以复制，职权清晰、目标明确、监督严格，因此能促进人力的有效聚合。无论是凯撒的军队还是亨利•福特的汽车帝国，等级制度都是其基本的管理架构，而且它仍然是这个星球上几乎所有企业的基本骨架。

    在当代的组织机构中，这种普遍的层级架构被辅以一系列核心管理流程，如战略规划、资本预算、财务报告、绩效管理、招聘、培训与发展、产品开发、项目管理、知识管理、风险管理等等。人们给这种军事化管理结构和行业管理结构的大杂烩起了一个名字——官僚主义。

    100年前，德国社会学家马克斯•韦伯称赞官僚主义“在精确性、稳定性、执行纪律的严格性和可靠性方面要优于其他（组织）形式”，此言不谬。

    官僚主义在解决问题的效率和规模化上是一个重大的进步。如果你的车库里停着好几辆车，每个口袋里都装着一部数码设备，又不用花80%的时间种庄稼糊口，你得好好感谢一下那些管理学的先驱者，因为是他们为现代化的工业企业奠定了基础。

    但是如果你的目标是效率以外的东西，比如适应能力、创新能力或激励人的潜能等，官僚主义就成了一个几乎难以逾越的障碍。官僚主义天生具有惰性，还存在人浮于事和机构臃肿的倾向。这是一个问题。因为如今运营效率只是一个入门级要求，虽然必要，但是仅靠它就想在竞争中获得成功还远远不够。

    在当今的商业世界，顾客的权力就像上帝，各行各业的门槛都在被碾碎，同时守业者的优势正在飞快消失，而员工们就像老百姓一样纷纷逃离独裁体制，因此仅靠效率是远远不够的。

    这就是我们在MIX上发起了“打破官僚主义黑客马拉松”活动（Busting Bureaucracy Hackathon ）欢迎你加入前卫思考者、管理学实践者和全球技术高手的队伍，为后官僚时代的组织构架奠定基石。（财富中文网）

    本文作者是MIX（管理创新交流平台）的共同创始人，也是《管理学的未来》和《现在什么最重要》的作者，同时也是伦敦商学院的客座教授。

    译者：朴成奎

    Wave 3: New Management Models

    I'm betting that the next IT-enabled revolution will upend old management models -- the structures and processes organizations use to plan, prioritize, allocate, coordinate, measure, hire, and reward. The fact is, the biggest drag on performance in most companies isn't a sclerotic supply chain or an insufficiently webby business model. Rather, it's a management model that empowers the few while disempowering the many; one that favors efficiency over every other business goal and conformity over every other virtue; one that makes organizations less adaptable, innovative, and inspiring than they could be and, increasingly, will need to be.

    The basic architecture of large-scale human coordination hasn't changed much since Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. Ask an engineer at Google, a branch manager at Credit Suisse, a nurse in Britain's National Health Service, a priest serving the poor in a Rio favela, a guard in Shanghai's Hongkou Detention Center, or an Emirates Airline pilot to draw a picture of their organization, and you'll probably get a rendering of the familiar pyramid.

    In one form or another, this has been one of humanity's most enduring social structures. Formal hierarchy is simple and scalable. Its clear lines of authority, cascading goals, and tight supervision facilitate the efficient aggregation of human effort. It provided the scaffolding for Caesar's army and Henry Ford's automotive empire, and it is still the backbone of just about every enterprise on the planet.

    In contemporary organizations, this universal architecture is complemented by a clutch of key management processes: strategic planning, capital budgeting, financial reporting, performance management, recruitment, training and development, product development, project management, knowledge management, risk management, and so on. There's a name for this mash-up of military command structures and industrial management: bureaucracy.

    A hundred years ago, the German sociologist Max Weber celebrated bureaucracy as being "superior to any other [organizational] form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability," and he was right.

    Bureaucracy was a major advance in solving the problem of efficiency at scale. If you have a couple of cars in the garage, a digital device in every pocket, and don't spend 80% of your time growing your own food, you owe a huge debt to those early management pioneers who laid the groundwork for the modern industrial enterprise.

    But when the goal is anything other than efficiency -- when it's adaptability, or innovation, or encouraging human potential -- bureaucracy turns out to be an almost insurmountable impediment. Bureaucracies, by their very nature, are inertial, incremental and uninspiring. That's a problem because today operational efficiency is just the price of entry; a necessary, but far from sufficient, condition for competitive success.

    In a business world where customers are omnipotent, where barriers to entry are crumbling, where incumbent advantages are fleeting, and where employees, like citizens, flee authoritarian regimes, efficiency isn't anywhere near enough.

    That's why we're launching the Busting Bureaucracy Hackathon at the MIX. Join progressive thinkers, management practitioners, and technologists from around the world in laying the groundwork for the post-bureaucratic organization.

    Gary Hamel is the co-founder of the MIX (Management Innovation eXchange) and author of "The Future of Management" and "What Matters Now." He's a visiting professor at London Business School.